I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had promised Nevada’s gambling industry a federal law to legalize Internet poker by the end of 2012, calling it the state’s “most important issue” since the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain was scuttled.

But in the end, Reid rolled snake eyes. And as the 113th Congress gets under way, the odds of legislation passing are even worse.

After all, as the article later notes Harry Reid himself thought that this bill was less important than getting Shelley Berkley elected over Dean Heller. The GOP is under no actual obligation to put policy over politics when the Other Side has openly abandoned the former for the latter; but if Reid really wants this bill to pass, well, there are ways. First, we pass a budget: then Harry Reid can find existing spending to cut that would offset the costs of this bill, plus a little bit extra of spending cuts – that’s for the house, you understand. Reid’s from Nevada, technically: he should understand the concept.

Via Instapundit, the Politico is reporting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to add language permitting online gambling to the tax compromise negotiated between the GOP and the President. This is a reversal for Reid, who was opposed to online gambling, right up to the point where certain casinos (who are now in favor of the legislation) dumped at least 500K into Reid’s re-election campaign. It is also precisely the sort of greedy trough-swilling that we’ve come to know, expect, and even kind of count on from the Democrats in the 111th Congress: I can’t imagine how a progressive could feel comfortable about this sort of tacit surrender by the Democratic leadership on the issue of hiking taxes. Reid isn’t trying to to scupper the legislation: he’s trying to take advantage of it in order to pay off two campaign contributors. He’s also doing it in a fairly clumsy fashion, but then nobody’s ever accused Harry Reid at being particularly good at his job.

The odds that this will pass are slim, by the way: there’s almost certainly enough Senate votes to prevent cloture and the House GOP will balk en masse. Which means that Harry Reid is pretty much wasting people’s time with this, during a session that’s already being overloaded by all the demands being made on it by panicky Democrats…